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This is the key quote: “I don’t know that you could build the infrastructure to evacuate an entire town that quickly,” I don't feel like this is thought throu

• petermcneeley 8y ago
  Pripyat (53k people) was evacuated by the USSR by bus in only a few hours. If you cant compete with an inefficient communist country from the 80s you probably should reexamine the structure of your society.
  • Piskvorrr 8y ago
    Where the nature of the emergency (Chernobyl nuclear fallout) did not block any of the escape routes.
    • llukas 8y ago
      Using cars to evacuate blocks pretty much every escape route.
      • Piskvorrr 8y ago
        Which also tells you something...if there were as many cars in Pripyat, the situation would have been similar. In other words, the two emergency situations differ in most aspects. But yeah, buses scale far better than individual cars, that's for sure. (Oh, and btw, given the long-running tinfoil campaigns against federal agencies in general and emergency response in particular, I can totally see how "This is FEMA, everyone get onto our buses, we'll take you somewhere safe" would prompt an orderly evacuation. Not.)
        • llukas 8y ago
          If there were as many cars in Pripyat and evacuation was done US-style then yes. Except it wasn't done US-style: http://chernobylplace.com/chernobyl-evacuation/ http://chernobylplace.com/chernobyl-evacuation/
  • twblalock 8y ago
    Every source I've found says that the government delayed the evacuation by more than a day before sending in the buses. Once the buses had arrived, it took several hours to evacuate.
  • segmondy 8y ago
    That's the key, bus. You can batch the task. In US you have 1 or 2 people per car.
• jcranmer 8y ago
  The interstate highways were partially designed to be able to evacuate large cities in the case of a nuclear attack. As anyone who has traveled on such roads during rush hour can well attest, their ability to do so is quite lacking. In modern times, the one major natural disaster we have that can be reasonably well predicted ahead of time to afford lengthy evacuation times is a major hurricane. We discovered during Hurricane Ike, however, that even a large city with ample lead time and comprehensive evacuation planning (including lane reversal plans to maximize egress capacity) cannot be adequately evacuated for a hurricane. What can be gleaned from the more mundane task of trying to move commuters into and out of cities is that, if your goal is to move people, then the first thing you should do is take them out of their cars. A highway lane has a fixed capacity of about 2,000 vehicles per hour, independent of if those vehicles are carrying 1 person or 100 people.
  • anticensor 8y ago
    Why are cities not planned such that evacuation routes are already commonly used routes in the morning peak? If you plan city that way, all roads will saturate equally instead of all traffic stuffing on highways and arterials, in non-evacuation scenarios. EDIT: descendant merged
    • nordsieck 8y ago
      > Why are cities not planned such that evacuation routes are already commonly used routes in the morning peak? No one wants to pay for that level of capacity.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      • dsfyu404ed 8y ago
        This. People would rather have "rush hour" be from 3-8pm rather than pay for enough spare capacity that peak demand only saturates the system from 5-6. If a four lane highway is saturated for 3hr you'd need twelve lanes to cut that time to 1hr. That's a lot of money.
• SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
  >How do you move 100,000 people out? Quickly? You don’t. It’s a function of people and time, short time, small number of people. Think about your daily drive. If you aren’t the first car at every single stop light, you likely getting out if 100,000 other people want to as well. I find it a tad frustrating that people don’t think about these things until they are happening, but life isn’t assured, your government might not always be coming to help, you are responsible for your own safety.
  • dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    >I find it a tad frustrating that people don’t think about these things until they are happening, but life isn’t assured, your government might not always be coming to help, you are responsible for your own safety. The second part of your sentence is the cause of the first. The idea that there exists a situation where one could be literally on your own with no authority figure to help you is an ideological non-starter to a lot of people. It's just wholly incompatible with everything they believe so any discussion about how to prepare for that possibility won't happen.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
• notatcomputer68 8y ago
  What about bikes?
  • komali2 8y ago
    We got trapped in Houston during Rita. Then we bought motorcycles and it never happened again.
  • dredmorbius 8y ago
    Deals poorly with walls of fire and choking smoke. Or elderly, disabled, infants, children, pets, ...
    • Filligree 8y ago
      No single solution works for everything. If most people get out on bicycles, then there's more space for the ones that have to use cars.
      • photojosh 8y ago
        You get the same objection to everyday bike commuting; what about those who can't? Well, they can stay in cars, but if even a small percentage of able-bodied adults got on a bike instead, then that's your problem solved.
      • dredmorbius 8y ago
        There are circumstances for which I'd suggest a bike is a reasonable mobility tool. Say, after a major earthquake, where immediate hazards are few, fuel supplies are limited, mobility options few, and when the ability to pick up the bike or wheel it through areas where the roadbed is badly damaged or littered with debris would be a strong plus for a bicycle. Having done quite a bit of cycling myself (multiple century and double-century rides -- miles, periods of 200-300+ mile weeks regulary, a 30+ mile round-trip commute, extensive tours), personal experience with much of the regions burnt by recent wildfires (I'd visited a friend in Chico fall of 2015, and drove out via the next highway north of Paradise, CA-32 to Lassen), with its mountainous terrain and very close-in forests (I was struck by how dry the region was three years ago, and was concerned at the time of what I'd do if a fire were to start), and been relatively close to smaller (though still multi-acre) wildfires, and watched footage of the Paradise evacuation, I would not want to rely on a bike to get me away from one under the circumstances prevailing for Paradise. The timeline of the fire, warnings, alerts, and evacuation were short. The fire was massive and intense. Flames were immediately adjacent to if not on the roadbed. One of the factors disabling vehicles were tires exploding from heat. And the primary road out (Skyway) is not a constant descent -- there are up-and-down sections. Cycling through that would simply be insane. Flat terrain, a constant descent, ample warning: possibly. Conditions of Paradise in November 2018: not a chance in the hell that it was.
• brm 8y ago
  Jams happen most often because people operate cars with incomplete information about the cars around them and inability to operate their cars optimally. As self driving cars advance and become networked the idea is that they could perform a lift like this while communicating with one another. That said, this is a possibility but not a proper solution. Public transit is perhaps also a possibility but not a solution. The real solution though seems much less palatable. Only a few disasters require the mass evacuation of people and perhaps its simply better to keep our cities and populations from the edges of fire prone lands and draw back our cities and people from the immediate coastal paths of hurricanes.
• winningcontinue 8y ago
  definitely possible. Not at all practical, except in the event of a quick mass evacuation like this.
• gpm 8y ago
  My instinct is to say buses, and don't wait too long. Let's do some math: Edit: Corrected math. Thanks! You can easily fit 20 people/bus. So that's 5,000 bus rides. 2000 busses/hour/lane is a reasonable estimate. They had a 4 lane road, 2 lanes in each direction, so 4000 buses per hour. Divide capacity by 2 to account for inefficiency and round up to get to 3 hours That's a lot of busses, but not an unreasonable number. To hit those numbers you have to be forcing people to evacuate by bus. If they try and take a car you need to stop them before they jam up the road. American's aren't going to take that easily. Of course you can encourage them to evacuate by car before you start the mandatory by bus evacuation. It's not like forest fires come with 0 warning.
  • llukas 8y ago
    Shouldn't it be 5000 bus rides? 100000/20 = 5000 so <3h and you're done assuming you got enough buses.
    • gpm 8y ago
      Yes... oops. I thought those numbers seemed high.
  • mrnobody_67 8y ago
    Typical bus holds 50 people
  • AngusH 8y ago
    Excellent to have some calculated numbers! Two thoughts: 1) Possibly the road could be rearranged to allow travel only in one direction, freeing up at least 1 extra lane? 2) It might be possible to get some of the bigger 50 or 80 capacity transit buses, or some large school buses? One article I found suggested California had in excess of 20,000 school buses, although I'm still looking for a reliable source to back that up.
    • gpm 8y ago
      1) Possible, but you've got significant traffic in both directions. You need to get bus's in as well as out. 2) Absolutely. And really you could probably stuff 80 people into your a bus in an emergency. But you're going to have a real problem organizing people onto buses so I worry that in reality you'd be running many well below peak capacity.
• flukus 8y ago
  100,000 people shouldn't be too hard, we move that many people into and back out of football stadiums regularly and inside a matter of hours. If it isn't being done then it's because it hasn't been planned and/or paid for, not because it's a scale we can't deal with.
  • nradov 8y ago
    It's relatively easy to quickly move 100K people in a city of 10M. But it's impossible to quickly move 100K in a city of 100K. It's all about proportions. There's not enough transportation infrastructure anywhere to get 100% of the population out.
    • rapjr9 8y ago
      In the US, building of new roads has not kept up with population increases (in part because there's no place to put new roads). Even the smallest towns tend to have delays and grid lock at rush hour, and that's only part of the population. The speed of the fires also requires a greater evacuation speed. A bicycle would probably be faster than a car given the capacity of the roads.